


The Tender Star

by ThrillingDetectiveTales



Category: Schitt's Creek
Genre: Alternate Universe - Space, F/F, Pre-Relationship
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-05
Updated: 2021-01-05
Packaged: 2021-03-10 21:34:37
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,038
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28444002
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ThrillingDetectiveTales/pseuds/ThrillingDetectiveTales
Summary: “Ugh,” Alexis scoffed, and flung herself back against the bench. She crossed her arms over her chest and leaned into Stevie, just a little, like she wasn’t fully aware she was doing it. “I can’t believe I’m going to die in a stupid subterrapod on a stupid asteroid because my stupid brother insisted on having stupid planetside flowers for his stupid wedding.”
Relationships: Stevie Budd/Alexis Rose
Comments: 12
Kudos: 11
Collections: fandomtrees





	The Tender Star

**Author's Note:**

  * For [scintilla10](https://archiveofourown.org/users/scintilla10/gifts).



> Happy holidays, scintilla!
> 
> I hope you enjoy it!
> 
> Title is from Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s, “The Light of Stars.”

“Um,” Alexis said, shuffling over on the bench seat to press her shoulder against Stevie’s as the subterrapod shuddered around them and ground to a slow, screeching halt. “What just happened?”

Stevie opened her mouth, but before she could respond, the white bar of light embedded into the ceiling flickered and went dark, as did the holo-readout floating against the front wall. There was an old-fashioned filament bulb in a metal cage fixed just above each window. They both flared to life and flooded the capsule with dim, red light.

“I think we stopped,” Stevie offered. Alexis glared at her through the ruddy dark and Stevie raised her eyebrows, unimpressed.

“Yes, _obviously,_ Stevie, thank you,” Alexis huffed. Her blonde hair was fashioned into an intricate braid that she had slung forward over her shoulder. She reached up to pet at it, flicking a wary glance out the little port window at the back of the capsule. “But like, _why_ did we stop?”

Her eyes widened a little further, nervous over her frown.

“Routine maintenance?”

Alexis ran her fingers down the soft rope of her hair, combing anxiously through the ends where they curled sweetly out from a glittering strip of elastic. “Wouldn’t they have made, like, some kind of announcement or something, if it was a routine stop?”

“Probably,” Stevie allowed. She turned to press her cheek against the window on her side of the little capsule, peering up and down as her breath fogged up the pane of imperiplast. There wasn’t much to see in the tunnel, beyond the vague impression of scaffolding against the rocky walls and the spherical suggestions of other subterrapods below and above them on the track, glowing with similarly faint red light. “Maybe a scalpruverm gnawed through the line somewhere.”

_“What?”_

When Stevie glanced over, Alexis’s eyes were huge and pale in her ashen face.

“Is that, like, a thing that actually happens?”

“Oh, yeah,” Stevie drawled with a knowing nod as she settled back into her seat. “All the time.” She stretched her legs out and tried not to pay too much attention to the heat of Alexis’s thigh where it brushed her own.

Alexis was tugging at her braid so hard that a few tendrils had come loose to curl in stylish disarray against her cheek or tumble down her shoulder.

“David said scalpruverms were a myth!”

Stevie snorted and fixed Alexis with a small, pointed smirk. “David was selling whole bags of turf moss for almost a month before he realized it wasn’t just ‘herbal tea.’” She took special care to mime the quotations with her fingers.

“Okay,” Alexis agreed, with a little roll of her eyes, “but, like, in David’s defense, he’s never really been cool enough to recognize party drugs at a glance.” She grimaced, tilting her head to one side like a sad puppy, then reached over to slap softly at Stevie’s arm. “And anyway, didn’t you buy, like, five of them before he discontinued the line?”

Stevie shrugged. “It was a good price.”

“Ugh,” Alexis scoffed, and flung herself back against the bench. She crossed her arms over her chest and leaned into Stevie, just a little, like she wasn’t fully aware she was doing it. “I can’t believe I’m going to die in a stupid subterrapod on a stupid asteroid because my stupid brother insisted on having stupid planetside flowers for his stupid wedding.”

She glowered over at Stevie, who held her hands up and protested, “Don’t look at me. I told him he should buy from a greenhouse.”

Inter-planetary deliveries were notoriously expensive, and for live merchandise, like flowers, the prices tended to climb even higher. Besides, once the blossoms were cut and arranged it wasn't like anyone would be able to tell whether they were truly dirt-nourished and ground-harvested, or grown aquaponically, like most non-terrestrial plants. When Stevie raised these two perfectly reasonable points during one of their many, many discussions regarding her duties as Honored Witness, David had disagreed, loudly and with great enthusiasm.

Alexis blinked, mouth curling up on one side. “Wow. Did he threaten to rescind your invitation on the spot?”

“Oh, absolutely,” Stevie nodded, and tried not to smile too wide when Alexis ducked her head against a soft laugh. Stevie risked a gentle nudge of her shoulder against Alexis’s and tilted her head back against the seat when Alexis looked over at her through her carefully sculpted lashes. Stevie licked her lower lip and tucked it under her teeth for a second before admitting, “It’s probably not scapruverms.”

“No?”

Stevie shook her head. Alexis considered this and then turned so she was facing Stevie with one leg tucked up underneath her.

“Okay,” she said, gesturing with her hands, “but, like, how do you _know_ that?”

“Because they’re kind of not real?” Stevie winced, apologetic.

Alexis’s mouth dropped open into a narrow ‘o’ shape, eyebrows leaping toward her hairline. She stared for a second, frozen in abject shock, and then smacked Stevie on the shoulder, hard.

“Ow!” Stevie gasped, at the same time that Alexis hollered, “I can’t believe you!”

Stevie rolled her eyes. “Like you wouldn’t have done exactly the same thing, in my position.”

“Still,” Alexis hissed, pinning Stevie with a glare that made something hot spark in the pit of her belly. “Not funny.” She swung around, arms crossed again, and stared mutinously forward.

Stevie let her stew for a moment, then held a hand up with her index finger hovering just above her thumb and hedged, “It was a _little_ funny.”

Alexis rolled her eyes, and shook her head, but it was obvious from the tight pinch of her cheek that she was fighting a smile.

The familiar announcement chime for the Intra-Asteroid Subterrapod System trilled overhead and the metered, slightly too perfect voice of an AI greeted, “Good evening, passengers. We regret to inform you that we are currently experiencing a minor mechanical issue. Repair bots have been dispatched and the Green Line should be mobile within the hour.

“In the meantime, please do not exit your pods or open your windows. At our current surface depth, the saturation of noxious chemicals in the ambient atmosphere may be lethal to organic life forms. Thank you for riding the Intra-Asteroid Subterrapod System — taking you straight through.”

The chime chirped again and Alexis muttered, “Well, that was certainly cheerful and up-lifting.” She sighed and poked at the narrow, metallic cuff around her left wrist. A thin wedge of light fluttered in the air above it for a second before another soft, artificial voice announced, “We’re sorry. You are currently out of service range. Please try your call again later.”

Alexis made a strangled sound of irritation and Stevie knocked their knees together before she could think better of it.

“Chill out,” she admonished, when Alexis glanced over at her. “This kind of thing happens all the time. We’ll be on our way in twenty minutes, tops.”

“The robot lady just said that the ambient atmosphere is deadly to organic life forms,” Alexis protested. She flapped a hand between them, to illustrate. _“We’re_ organic life forms!”

Stevie waved her off. “She said it _might_ be. All that stuff gets filtered out before the O2 makes its way in here, anyway. As long as we keep the windows closed and suppress any urges to crawl up the scaffolding, we’re perfectly safe.”

Alexis stared at her. “There is no amount of Systems cred or heavy coin that would convince me to climb out into a big, dark, dirty hole that goes all the way through the middle of the planet,” she said, with feeling.

“Technically, we’re on an asteroid."

“Whatever!” Alexis lapsed into silence after that, but it was plain from her rigid posture and the way she wouldn’t stop plucking at her braid that she still wasn’t comfortable, staring off into the middle distance with her brow furrowed over her stormy eyes.

“Look,” Stevie sighed, “subterrapods are kind of, uh - ”

“Screte?” Alexis suggested.

“I was gonna say slow,” Stevie grinned, “but sure. Subterrapods are kind of a screte way to travel, but nobody’s died on one since the colony was founded. And even then, it was one of Roland's great-great-great-great grand-uncles or something, so it barely counts.”

Alexis shot her a flat look and reached up to brush a stray strand of hair away from her face. “Forgive me if that doesn’t make me feel a whole lot better about being trapped in a bottomless black void.”

“It’s not _bottomless,”_ Stevie protested with a lazy wave of her hand. “Just long and dark and scary and full of poisonous gas.” Alexis narrowed her eyes and Stevie smiled at her, close-mouthed.

“You’re enjoying this, aren’t you?”

“What ever gave you that idea?” Stevie blinked twice, big and deliberate.

“You and David deserve each other,” Alexis grumbled. She slouched down against the bench, still pressed against Stevie from knee to shoulder, and shook her head. “I still don’t understand why he had to take the glider today. He knew we were supposed to pick up the flowers! It’s on his stupid, impossible wedding schedule. He's been reminding me for weeks.”

“I think Patrick had some kind of last-minute appointment.” Stevie shrugged. “Subterrapod’s not so bad.”

She was perhaps being kinder to the IASS than it rightly deserved, as the least reliable method of public transportation that SC-HT5-CRK had to offer, but defusing worked up Roses before they could devolve into full on tantrums was an arena in which Stevie excelled. The white lie would be worth the trouble if it calmed Alexis down even a little.

If she were being honest, Stevie would have much preferred to drive her own glider, but it was undergoing a stint in the shop after she’d taken it on a jaunt to neighboring colony 3LM-D4L3 the previous weekend. The frontmost pulse ring had slipped out of alignment when she caught an unexpectedly slippery grav-stream while jettisoning back, and now it was laid up at Bob’s Garage waiting on an off-world part to be delivered.

“Of course he did,” Alexis said darkly, as if the unexpected shuffling of Patrick’s calendar was a personal slight against her. She had one arm curved across her stomach and her other hand cupped over her knee, fingers drumming quick and nervous against the bone. She flicked an agitated look out the window on her side. “We would have been better off walking, even if we ended up circling the whole stupid asteroid.”

Hell, Stevie had nearly suggested the same thing herself when they first set off. As long-established mining colonies went, SC-HT5-CRK wasn’t all that big. Even settled on the complete opposite side of the asteroid as it was, the post office wasn’t far, but David would murder them both without remorse if anything happened to the two-thousand creds' worth of fussy, planet-grown flowers they were responsible for carting back with them. 

“Hey,” Stevie said, and reached out to curl her palm over Alexis’s own on some unexpected and worrisome impulse she didn't care to examine too closely, “everything’s gonna be fine.”

Alexis looked down at their joined hands, and then up at Stevie, and then down at their hands again. There was something thick and warm in the air between them, coiling like smoke. Slowly, and taking clear care not to dislodge Stevie’s grip, Alexis turned her own hand over and slotted their fingers together.

“Yeah?” she asked, sounding young and lost and hopeful in a way that Stevie didn’t usually associate with her.

Stevie swallowed, throat dry, and croaked, “Yeah.”

Alexis ducked her head, smile a sharp white sliver in the dull red shadows, and heaved a long, purposeful sigh through her nose. Her skin was warm and soft where her fingers twined between Stevie’s, palms pressed together. Feeling as though she was standing roughly fifteen feet behind her body, Stevie peered down and saw her own thumb sweeping in reassuring strokes along the side of Alexis’s hand.

They didn’t say anything, didn’t even look at each other, but when the lights came back on and the holo-reader flared and the pod started trundling forward again ten minutes later, they held on and didn’t let go.

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading! <3


End file.
